a story worth telling is a life worth living

Leave my drinking habits alone

Upon arriving at my desk this morning, I found 2/3 of a swallow of Diet Mountain Dew left in a bottle on the folded sheet of paper I use as a coaster.

The bottle had been left open (as I’d thrown the cap at a coworker for saying she couldn’t read the paper she was designing because “it was all Greek” to her (the paper was actually in Greek, to be distributed in Greece)) and the pop would obviously be flat. The first task I took upon myself was to drink that 2/3 of a swallow because I wasn’t going to waste it, damn it.

Usually, this isn’t a problem I have. I’m not the kind of person to not finish a beverage of any type because I’m just a thirsty individual. Flatness and warmness has never bothered me, and I even went through phases of my life where I preferred to drink pop that way. Overall, the finishing of a beverage some might call “nasty” was a task I rarely encountered while on my own, but one I gladly complete.

It was on this sole tenet of my life and livelihood that made my family visiting for a week difficult.

They came for the Christmas holiday — arriving on the 24th and leaving on the 31st of December — and we all resided for that period in my one-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t too bad since I have a pretty big living room and I got to go to work for three of those days. But between the five of us: father, mother, 19-year-old brother and tag-along 15-year-old she-cousin, there were some beverage misunderstandings.

The most annoying was one that I have been dealing with my entire life. My father likes to pick things up and put them in the fridge. Any beverage he finds left alone, he instantly moves. I went to the restroom while he was present and when I returned, my beer was in the fridge. This was always especially troublesome with ice cream based beverages when I was growing up.

Whenever I would come home with a milkshake and want to let it melt a bit, so I’d leave it on the counter. Ten minutes later, upon returning for it, it’s in the freezer. Not only does that mean the opposite process I desired been forced upon my beverage, but it’s been utterly ruined. Putting a milkshake in the freezer makes it harder than it is supposed to be and means I can’t drink it. And I’m the kind of person who only drinks a milkshake, never eats it (unless it’s chunks of something out of the bottom).

As to my cousin— perpetrator of the problem I was least used to dealing with as she did not live under the same roof as me growing up — she liked to open a can of pop (or pour a glass of orange juice), take two drinks, then leave it and not finish it. She claims it wasn’t her, but nobody else in my family was drinking her Diet Coke (Pepsi rules, Coke is disgusting). This problem was of course made worse by my father putting hardly touched beverages into the fridge and also by my brother’s problem.

He likes to leave empty cans and dishes around. He’ll get defensive about this and blame his friends, who are usually partners in crime with him in this regard, but that’s his own damn fault. But he had no friends in Gainesville, Fla., so he was stuck with the responsibility. Of course, I couldn’t tell the difference between his empty can and my cousin’s (non-Coke product) full one. I spilled twice. Honestly, I can deal with my brother leaving things everywhere. But I’m always going to complain about it. The problem was the confusion between cans belonging to him and to my cousin.

Finally, my mother. I really don’t have anything to complain about her for. She’s perfect. I guess that’s where I get it from.

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#Life is a story blog about a cast of characters trying to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. They will share the stories they are a part of as they try to find purpose and direction, and hopefully enough of a paycheck to leave money in the budget for beer. This is a story driven by curiosity, uncertainty and passion for life.